A fight to retake Iraq’s second-largest city from the Islamic State is underway and The Times has reporters and a photographer near the front lines. We also look at how the military campaign may define President Obama’s legacy as a wartime leader.

In preparation for the arrival of Iraqi and Kurdish forces, the militants filled trenches with oil, built tunnels and planted bombs along the roads into the city and on streets inside it.

• The other border.

The U.S.’s northern border is nearly three times as long as the one it shares with Mexico. The areas adjacent to Canada, sparsely populated and with comparatively few border agents, have become a haven for smugglers and criminal organizations.

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A barricade in Alburgh, Vt.. The road, which leads to Canada, has been blocked for years.CreditJacob Hannah for The New York Times

“We can’t forget about this area,” said Senator Jon Tester of Montana. “If we take our eye off of that, they will go where the weakest link is.”

Business

• We’re used to stories about Wall Street traders swindling investors. But one dealmaker and avid art collector claims that he was scammed by a professor and her son, who sold him forged paintings.

• A new challenger to Bloomberg L.P. has emerged. A former top executive at the company has joined Money.net to build a low-cost alternative to the data terminals that fuel Michael R. Bloomberg’s business empire.

• In memoriam: The engineer Dr. Leo L. Beranek, 102. A company he helped found built a computer network that became the precursor to the internet.

Noteworthy

Michelle Obama is being celebrated for elevating the role of first lady.CreditMichael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency

“Michelle Obama will have her own legacy, separate from her husband’s. And it will be that she was the first first lady to show women that they don’t have to choose. That it’s okay to be everything.”

Those are words from a thank-you note the writer and actress Rashida Jones wrote to Mrs. Obama. She was joined by the feminist activist Gloria Steinem and the authors Jon Meacham and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Back Story

A black doctor was in the news last week after writing on Facebook that a flight attendant seeking help for a sick passenger refused to believe she was a physician.

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A book of poems by Phillis Wheatley, who had to defend herself before an 18-member panel.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

Her experience touched a nerve with minority women who have faced skepticism about their credentials.

The episode also calls to mind the poet Phillis Wheatley’s ordeals nearly 250 years ago.

Kidnapped as a child in West Africa and sold into slavery, she was bought by the Wheatley family in Boston, who named her after the ship that brought her across the Atlantic. They taught her to read, and she channeled her intellect into poetry. Her work earned praise in the colonies as well as Europe.

Some of Boston’s most learned men, though, doubted that a slave could write so beautifully.

In October 1772, Wheatley successfully defended herself to an 18-member panel. She “is thought qualified to write them,” the men said of the poems.

The next year she toured England, where her book was released, “marking the beginning of an African-American literary tradition,” according to the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A letter to an acquaintance on this day in 1773 indicates that her fame also won her freedom. “Since my return to America my Master has at the desire of my friends in England given me my freedom,” she wrote.

But in one of her poems, she addressed the pain of slavery more directly: “And can I then but pray/Others may never feel tyrannic sway?”